Challenges help us grow in many ways

Over the years I’ve heard parents give many reasons for over protecting, over indulging and over controlling their children. Following are some examples:

• “I grew up having nothing and don’t want my children to experience the struggles I had to endure”.

• “This is a tough cruel world and I want to protect my children from it as much as possible until they get to be adults and then can hopefully take care of themselves”.

• I only want my kids to have to focus on the basics. Life has become too complicated and they can learn about the complexities when they get older and more mature”.

There are many examples in life where our ability to achieve certain goals is based on building strength and endurance in small increments and struggling in the process. The weight lifter who gradually builds strength and endurance by adding weight, the athlete who increases successful outcomes by persistent practice, the student who increases knowledge by long hours of study are all struggling to reach a desired goal. Take away the struggle and you’ve made the goal common and ordinary and usually therefore less desirable.

Granted, there are many pit falls in today’s society that children need help in avoiding. The trick is knowing where to draw the line between healthy protection and overly protective control.

Following is a little story provided by a wise person attempting to illustrate to this point.

A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared, he sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress.

It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and it could go no farther. So the man decided to help the butterfly, he took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.

The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly. What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening was God’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved it’s freedom from the cocoon.

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If God allowed us to go through our life without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as what we could have been. And we could never fly. So have a nice day and struggle a little.

Harold H. LeCrone, Jr., Ph.D. Copyright 1999